ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a story, "A Murder, A Mystery, and a Marriage," that helps us glimpse how Twain planned to develop the plot of Pap's murder. Although it has been little recognized, a careful chronological look at the writing of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will find it hard not to conclude that the chapter was initially intended as something considerably different from what it ultimately became—namely, as a murder mystery. In this narrative, the victim is Huck's father, Pap Finn, who is shot to death and whose body is found in a house floating on the river. Pap's nakedness, together with the description of the house's filthiness that follows, is often taken to indicate that he was killed in a whorehouse. In addition, this story offers an important hint as to the reason for the absence of Pap's boots, in that its opening scene actually poses another mystery separate from that of the absence of tracks—a mystery related to clothing.
